The 7th Annual Year in Ideas

Published: December 9, 2007

EDIBLE COCKTAIL, THE Dave Arnold, the head of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan, is by training not a chef but a sculptor. He worked with metals and machinery as an art student and once battled a fire-breathing dragon. (It was a modified air blower that spit flaming kerosene; he wore a welding jacket and carried a lance.)

These days Arnold's fits of ingenuity, though tame in comparison, are no less creative. Consider a recent offering from his kitchen laboratory: The edible cocktail.

The premise is simple: Make a ''pickle'' with alcohol instead of salt and brine. The execution is more complicated. Arnold cuts peeled cucumbers into spears and puts them in a Mason jar filled with an 8-to-1 mixture of gin and vermouth. He also adds a touch of simple syrup to counteract the cucumbers' inherent bitterness. The Mason jar is then placed into a vacuum machine, which removes the air, collapsing the cucumbers' air pockets. This is a process similar to that used in sous-vide cooking, in which food is vacuum-sealed in a pouch and heated. Thanks to the Mason jar, the cucumbers keep their consistency. (If they were sealed in the usual plastic bag, they would lose their crunchiness.)

When the vacuum seal is broken, the martini mixture rushes in to fill the spaces in the cucumber where the air used to be. The resulting spears have the smooth, crisp texture of pickles. Arnold calls this kind of cucumber a ''flash pickle,'' as the changes in texture and flavor that can take days to produce with salt and brine take about two minutes in the vacuum machine. Each spear has roughly the same amount of alcohol as a standard martini. To serve, he sprinkles the spears with celery seed, grated lime zest and flaky Maldon sea salt. JON FASMAN

ELECTRIC HOCKEY SKATE, THE [17] When Tory Weber, a hockey enthusiast from Calgary, went to fetch the paper one frigid day in 1985, the soles of his warm running shoes melted the ice on his steps, sending him tumbling backward. He wondered, ''What if I could get this reduced-friction scenario going in the right direction?'' Later, while working at a lumberyard, he began devoting free time to the idea of a heated ice-skate blade that would yield a better glide with less effort. The skate he devised finally goes on sale this month.

Weber was still ''poor as a church mouse'' when, in 2001, he read about the development of a battery small enough to fit inside the molded plastic that holds a hockey skate's blade. He and a partner, Jeremy Furzer, began running tests and soon found that heated blades, which melt more ice and thus glide on a slightly thicker layer of water, can produce 50 to 75 percent less resistance to motion. ''I thought, Gee whiz, if we had a 5 or 10 percent difference we'd be in good shape,'' Weber says.

When they made their pitch to large skate manufacturers, the companies liked the idea but said to come back when it was fully commercialized. That happened again and again. Their fortunes improved in 2004, when Wayne Gretzky [18] signed on as an investor and endorser. Already, several unidentified N.H.L. players are using Thermablades during games as part of a league-approved trial. EVAN HUGHES

FACES DECIDE ELECTIONS Here's something to keep in mind as election time approaches: Study the politicians. Not their dossiers or their domestic policies, but their faces. Because according to new research by Anthony Little, a psychologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland, faces may decide elections.

During the last United States presidential election, Little created two computer-generated composite faces that reflected the differences between George W. Bush and John Kerry (but were unrecognizable as them): Kerry's face is longer and narrower; Bush's jaw is wider, his brow lower. Little and several collaborators surveyed people online and on the streets of Liverpool. The Bush face rated more ''masculine'' and ''dominant,'' while the Kerry face was more ''forgiving'' and ''likable.'' Though the Kerry face was ranked most ''intelligent,'' most participants said they'd choose the Bush face to run their country. ''The percentages were similar to how people actually voted in the election,'' Little says.

People were then asked whom they'd elect during a time of war versus a time of peace: Kerry won the most ''face votes'' during peacetime, Bush during wartime.

Of course, faces don't sway everyone. ''Die-hard Republicans or Democrats will vote for whoever's leading their party,'' Little says. But uncommitted voters are another story: ''Those are the voters more likely to be swayed by visual appearance,'' he says. ''They're also the ones who really swing elections.''

How reliable are predictions of character based on facial interpretations? Not very. Earlier this year, Little published a paper describing ''personality inventories'' he'd taken of 191 people that determined whether they were extroverts or introverts. He then created two composite faces, blending the most extroverted subjects' faces into one and the most introverted subjects' faces into the other. He asked other people to rank those composite faces as extroverted or introverted. Their judgments were right only a bit more than half of the time. ''That's not terribly good,'' Little says. ''It's only slightly better than chance.''